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CFMoto
CFMoto was founded in China in 1989 and came into the US Market 12 years ago, primarily selling under the scooters market. Since 2017, the company has increased its sales by tenfold and expanded its US Market to include on-road motorcycles, sport and utility side-by-sides, and off-road ATVs. Over the past few years, CFMoto has placed an emphasis on both product value and quality choice for outdoorsmen, sportsmen, farmers, and ranchers.
When Operational Leader of Logistics, Jim Osterberg, rejoined CFMoto in January 2022 (after previously serving as CFMoto’s Vice President of Service Operations from 2015 to 2016) his first priority was consolidating the variety of different warehouses.
“We were using too many warehouses and not good enough ones - that’s what it boiled down to,” Osterberg said. “We were trying to do some regional work, but could never quite get the product mix right.”
“Everybody’s approachable, [Smart Warehousing has] helped me with best practices and what works well for your partners. I can leverage what has worked well to work a bit more efficiently and cost-effectively, together.”
Prior to Smart Warehousing, CFMoto shipped their products from China and distributed them to warehouses in the United States. However, they faced issues trying to get products efficiently and cost-effectively to their designated warehouses. When the Port of Los Angeles was backed up, they would ship products to South Carolina, then Tacoma, then Oakland, and then New York. Instead of attempting to outsmart port backups, Osterberg decided to simplify and use one warehouse for a less expensive domestic outbound.
“We were using somebody else in Kansas City who had been with CFMoto since day one, until my third day here,” Osterberg said. “One visit to [Smart Warehousing] and understanding you guys, I put my trust in [Smart Warehousing] and said everything is going to Smart.”
Now, CFMoto’s products arrive in the Port of Long Beach and are delivered to one of Smart Warehousing’s five Kansas City locations.
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"Having all my products in one spot creates a much more efficient outbound domestic delivery for me. I need to reduce my LTLs to less than 10% and I need to ship out a lot of products. In order to ship it, I need to be able to receive it. That was honestly the biggest issue with the competition was their inability to receive and racking up fees like crazy. I didn’t have product to ship so it was still sitting in containers.”
"There are 3 core reasons we chose Smart. Their ability to automate and connect into systems, the opportunity for Smart to help us scale with their wide footprint, and all that a reasonable cost."
One feature that drew Osterberg to Smart Warehousing is the dedication to innovation and seamless visibility with Kargo towers. Kargo is a smart-loading dock platform that offers a hardware and software solution to inspect incoming and outgoing freight at loading docks.
“Smart Warehousing has partnered with Kargo to provide our customers extreme insight into how freight moves in and out of our warehouse’s in real time along with photographic and video evidence of customer’s products,” said Smart Warehousing’s Director of Innovation and Automation, Clifton Cooper. “Kargo utilizes an onboard visualization and machine learning to provide real time analysis of label images to compare against bill of lading documents. The API first software allows Smart Warehousing to easily integrate and develop analytics and reporting for our customers from the tower’s immense processing power.”
Due to regulations on motor vehicles, there are products that are designated only for California that cannot go anywhere else and vice versa. While all units look the same, they have a different bill of material and a different VIN. Prior to Smart Warehousing, it was an extremely costly mistake if regulated inventory ended up in the wrong location. For Osterberg, Kargo provides the visibility to monitor the accuracy of outbound shipments.
In addition to the value of improving LTL costs and product visibility, Osterberg has had a positive experience working with the Smart Warehousing team.
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